A Psychoanalysis of US Foreign Policy

They came from England fleeing religious persecution in search of religious freedom and a chance to make a new life in lands that had been explored for more than a hundred years in the North Atlantic. The first successful and permanent English colony was established in what is called today Jamestown Virginia in 1607. Then the pilgrims followed in the Mayflower landing in what is today called Plymouth harbor Massachusetts in the winter of 1620, landing in December 16.

On March 16, 1621, the first formal contact with the native Indians (Native Americans) was made. A native Indian named Samoset walked into the settlement without fear. He needed no fear, he was lord of his land long owned by his ancestors for thousands of years. He proclaimed “Welcome Englishmen” in English. The pilgrims must have been surprised.

He explained that he had learned English from English sailors and trappers who frequented the area in search of fish and game. He must have thought that, yet another group of people coming to settle the lands just as his ancestors had done thousands of years before him. The white people would form their own tribal confederations and they would all live as all other tribes on that vast expanse of land.

Yet Samoset did not know that the fateful statement made on that day – “Welcome Englishmen” – would doom his people forever. Life was hard for the new colony which they called Plymouth. The first year was difficult, cast by winds of history in a new land, they struggled to adapt. The native Indians helped them to survive by teaching them how to farm and fertilize the land. In early October 1621 the first thanksgiving was celebrated. It was celebrated by the colonists and the native Indians who provided fowls, turkey and deer. It lasted three days. Three days seem to play an important role in history.

In 1630 John Winthrop led a group of about 700 colonists to join a group of earlier settlers from the Plymouth colony who had moved on and settled in an area which is today Salem Massachusetts. He delivered his sermon of the “City on the Hill” while on board the ship Arbella sailing to America. He proclaimed that their new community would become like a”City on a Hill watched by the world”. His colony would be known to history as the Massachusetts bay colony.

Less than 60 years after its founding, more than 80 percent of the native Indians in the area were exterminated. The stage is now set for the psychoanalysis of American Foreign Policy. The native Indians had said “Welcome Englishmen”. The colonists had said “Our community is a shining city on a hill”. They believed they were exceptional, and that they were God’s chosen people.

Could a people who believed they were exceptional, a chosen race cohabit with a welcoming people and merge into one nation, one people as had been done across the vast expanses of the flow of history?

The exceptional English people began preemptive strikes against the welcoming Indian people as early as 1622. It was the first act in the drama of American foreign policy. An unfounded rumor of a military attack gave the colonists a false casus belli to lure two native Indian military leaders to a house under the pretense of sharing a meal and to negotiate.

The two native Indians not suspecting anything were stabbed to death. The same motif of lies and treachery dripping with the trail of tears on the canvas of American history would repeat itself year after year, decade after decade, century after century until the native Indians were destroyed with the few remaining ones condemned to reservations.

It would be several centuries before Raphael Lemkin, born in Belarus of the then Russian empire, would coin the word genocide. But it was genocide for all practical purposes. As the motif repeated itself, the US would proclaim, she was the city on a shining hill, the exceptional people destined by God to bring freedom and the pursuit of happiness to the people of the world. The native Indians found their freedom in the stupor and quite embrace of an imposed genocide.

The easy victories gained over a weakened, technologically conservative but welcoming people from the Atlantic to the Pacific, century after century, shaped the American psyche. It fueled her self confidence. It seemingly affirmed the rightness of her policies. It defined her character. If lies and treachery did not work, she could always resort to devastating violence to achieve her aims.

It was now a reflexive behavior, embedded in the subconscious of the American elite. It would become her modus operandi. In the framework of her belief in her exceptionalism, her being God’s chosen nation, her foreign policy in relation to other nations and people shaped by the experiences of the American frontier, her brutal subjugation of the native Indian tribes was justified. She had being chosen by history. She believed.

There are striking parallels to another story, a subjugation of a land in West Asia in what was called the land of Retenu.

We now move to the year 1991. The Soviet Union collapses. The US achieves unprecedented power. The last of the most powerful “meta-Indian” confederations the Soviet Union collapses. The remnants of the Soviet Confederation must be further broken into smaller units and put in large reservations in Eurasia. In the US psyche, the US is the colony from the mother country England, the shining city on a hill on the North American foothold on the globe. The rest of the globe is the meta-American frontier that must be conquered and subjugated.

That meta-American frontier is populated by the new “Indians”, the non-Americans, the non-European, the non-Jewish populations of the globe. The motif of the original American frontier will be applied to them fueled by the subconscious of the constructed American psyche. They need to be subjugated and put in economic and political reservations.

Destructive economic policies which is the new alcohol are designed to intoxicate the members of the global reservation, to keep them in a state of economic and political stupor. The tactic has been very effective in the American reservations in the US. Alcoholism keeps the few remaining native Indians in a comatose state. That way they do not remember their history. After all, they all only became citizens in 1924 on the lands which had be owned by their ancestors.

For America, subconsciously she is still taming the frontier, destroying the tribes and consigning them to reservations, expanding her power. Today Libya, an “Indian” tribe, has been broken and is in a reservation. They have been given the alcohol of guns and chaos. Iraq and Syria are other “Indian” tribes she seeks to break and quarantine in reservations. They are being fed the alcohol of Islamic radicalism and guns.

Just recently, “moderate” Islamists in Syria were approved for a 500 million dollar military aid program to up the tempo of the attempt to turn Syria into a reservation. Ukraine another “Indian” tribe is being given the alcohol of neo-Nazi nationalism and Russophobia. America tries the same motif all around the world especially in Africa. It is in her psyche. It is permanent, immutable. Only a fall brings a real change to what seems immutable. So will the decline of this American empire.

Russia and China have learnt to not be modern day Samosets.

Today the western pilgrims come to our African shores bringing us so called free trade agreements and foreign investment. The pilgrims of yore in 1620 offered the native Indians free trade. We know how it all ended in the alcohol fueled stupor of the reservations condemned to a slow cultural and ethnic death.

Will Africa learn not to be a Samoset version 2.0 as she was at the dawn of the age of the colonial domination of Africa? We leave the answer to those who will stand in judgment in the great hall of Maat when they cross the river beyond the land of the living.